Isn't there an alternative explanation? That Samsung could not reveal that they knew about the 64 bit processor in advance? They likely promise Apple a firewall between components manufacturing and the rest of the business.

Yes it certainly is possible that Samsung was involved or will even continue to make all of the A7s. The article notes this.

However, it is presenting a series of facts that suggest that TSMC is ready earlier than expected. We will have to wait to find out for sure, because nobody that knows is talking yet.

LOL, probably, but I just did some Googling and it turns out that in June 2013 at Red Hat convention in Boston, Fedora demoed the first full Linux distribution running on ARMv8. The article did not elaborate if it was SoC but I assume so.

The concept is still confusing as to updating the software. As we do it now we just copy some files into a directory but with SoC you have to flash the entire image and reboot don't you? Not exactly ideal for servers. I have servers that have been running 24/7 for years without a reboot while we have upgraded various core server applications such as php, mysql, apache,etc, not the kernel though.

Well iOS and OSX are now both 64-bit. I haven't jailbroken an iOS device for at least 4 years, but even then it looked structurally like OSX -- with a few unneeded constructs removed, a few new ones added and a touch UI. I suspect they are even closer now.

I don't know if you really need to "flash the image" and reboot - or if Apple is just being lazy as there [currently] is no need to keep, say, the AppleTV running during update.

IMO, 64-bit iOS 7 and A7 chip will come into their own on the NeXT AppleTV and iPads (A7X chip, anyone?).

In other posts, I've mentioned what I see happening to the AppleTV -- everything from a major player game console, 4K video content delivery, Home Control Server, Home Video Streamer to multiple iPads as personal TVs...

I can also see a similar headless self-contained AppleTV-like package, with thunderbolt, used as a Home/Backup/iCloud server.

The above package could also be used standalone or as a module of a server or render farm.

And, yes, for these uses the 'uptime' advantages of 'nix will need to be exploited.

"Swift generally gets you to the right way much quicker." - auxio -

"The perfect [birth]day -- A little playtime, a good poop, and a long nap." - Tomato Greeting Cards -

That is like blowing a 10 gallon air compressor through a straw!
Apple what the heck do you think you are doing?

That is nothing more than marketing ploy to get people reinterested in the smartphone as we are already seeing saturation in the market place.

Actually, Apple's first 64-bit PowerMac G5 from 2003 had 256MB standard on the low end, and even into 2006 the machine shipped with only 512MB from the factory. Lots I expansion potential in them, but few power users of the day installed more than 2GB.

64-bit Windows PCs similarly were commonly using 1GB of RAM while still taking advantage of 64-bit features.

Having more than 4GB wasn't common before ~2008. 64-bit desktop PCs arrived in 2002-2003.Edited by Corrections - 9/14/13 at 1:29pm

Another thing that allowed Apple to surprise everyone with 64-bit is OS X. It shares a core codebase with iOS, so they were able to test all their 64-bit code in the wild for years with no-one suspecting anything.

Very good point. For sure Apple has been testing 64 bit for years, just like they were testing Intel chips for a decade before switching in the Mac. It is the little things that make it possible to make a switch from 32 bit to 64 bit. Often times we castigate Microsoft as being incompetent for its inability to pull of transitions that Apple makes look so easy. In reality, Microsoft and Samsung aren't as stupid and incompetent as they appear. They just don't have a culture of vision, planning, and attention to details that Apple has.

Yeah...

While we were arguing over the paint job, hub caps and upholstery (UI, icons, skeuomorphics) -- Apple was replacing the engine (and we didn't even notice) Edited by Dick Applebaum - 9/14/13 at 11:46am

"Swift generally gets you to the right way much quicker." - auxio -

"The perfect [birth]day -- A little playtime, a good poop, and a long nap." - Tomato Greeting Cards -

One of the things that frustrates me about Dilger's writing is that he clearly spends a huge amount of time writing all-purpose notes about Apple. And then whenever there's a small point to be made, he copies huge SWATHES of these notes and ends up with having an ENORMOUS article. You have to pick through carefully to find the pertinent material. I've long since learned that there's not much to be gained. AI, please make it so I can tell who's written each story, so that I don't have to click these Dilger links.

You can usually tell by the headline -- and, if it has the editorial badge, it's almost a given!

"Swift generally gets you to the right way much quicker." - auxio -

"The perfect [birth]day -- A little playtime, a good poop, and a long nap." - Tomato Greeting Cards -

AppleInsider, thanks for seeing beyond the gold and other color phones and reporting on the depth of technology and innovation that is Apple. With 64bit A7 and with battery saving M7 Apple is laying a solid foundation for the future.

Agreed. Tim's "doubling down" on secrecy actually worked pretty well. While all if the blogs were focused on phone colors and the "cheap" iPhone, Apple stuns with the new Mac Pro and now the internals of the 5s.

One of the things that frustrates me about Dilger's writing is that he clearly spends a huge amount of time writing all-purpose notes about Apple. And then whenever there's a small point to be made, he copies huge SWATHES of these notes and ends up with having an ENORMOUS article. You have to pick through carefully to find the pertinent material. I've long since learned that there's not much to be gained. AI, please make it so I can tell who's written each story, so that I don't have to click these Dilger links.

Your summation of the writing process is not correct, but yes AI articles have a byline if you're not interested in reading much. You can wait it out for summaries that will appear later.

But what a silly thing to take the time to login and complain about if your time is really so valuable.

I don't think the A7 story has played out yet: the 64-bit architecture seems unnecessary for a phone (just as 4 cores do), just make the 32-bit cores go faster (as Apple did in A6). The 64-bit architecture brings more than removing the 4GB barrier bur doesn't seem to earn its keep (in a balanced, energy-efficient design). It brings heavy-weight compute that the new image-processing functions in the camera might exploit but surely that's not enough to justify it.

However, Apple does not do specs for their own sake so there's a reason somewhere. How about the free iWork apps being the consumers of the performance, providing content-creation so iWork online (in Internet Explorer) can compete with MS Office? So perhaps the coming new iPads will be the major beneficiaries of A7's power. That would be exciting.

You gain a performance benefit, even if the memory barrier is not an issue.

The A7 has more general purpose registers (31 instead of 14), and these are all 64-bits wide. More registers means less use of the stack or RAM to hold temporary variables such as pointers, counters, etc. If you have a large block of data to process, a 64-bit program can do it in 64-bit chunks at a time, instead of looping through twice as often, processing it 32-bits at a time. There are a few other novelties in the 64-bit ARM design, like PC-relative addressing, guaranteed 128-bit SIMD operations, etc., none of which are about memory barriers.

That is like blowing a 10 gallon air compressor through a straw!
Apple what the heck do you think you are doing?

Galbi, you're funny, as in funny-strange. Apple knows it's making a faster mobile processor and a faster microprocessor in general, that's what. To start with, the A7 has twice as many general purpose registers as the A6 or even Intel's X64 processor architecture. (Oh, wouldn't Intel and AMD like to have 16 more registers to work with? )

It makes sense the A7 is TSMC. Apple could still place a large order for the A6 with Samsung for the 5C and iPad Mini so Samsung wouldn't even notice a significant change in A6 requests to signify anything's going on. I think Samsung is truly surprised by the A7.

I'd like an A7X in the Apple TV. That would give it the necessary power to be a decent gaming device as well. And Apple could make the Apple TV an exclusive 64bit machine. Open it up to App developers (like so many developers want) but make it mandatory that all Apps must be 64 bit from the start (this would be easy since there's no installed base of Apps to convert like there is with the iPhone/iPad).

The argument about Qualcomm chips being used in Samsung in North America is uninformed - they are used because Qualcomm has a monopoly on the cellular baseband chips required for several of the carriers in North America, and it is better power to use Qualcomm's all-in-one than to use Qualcomm's baseband only chip with Samsung's Exynos. Several companies have done this, including Samsung's S3, so nothing new to see here.

You are able to correctly identify why Samsung's Exynos 5 can't be used in NA, but that's an example of a design choice in well understood circumstances.

The result, not the appologetic explanation, is interesting. Only some fraction of GS4s will have that heavily hyped chip, but conversely, the economies of scale (already smaller than iPhone 5) will be spilt with Qualcomm.

Ask yourself why the far more profitable Apple designed the iPhone to use a separate AP and BP rather than a custom integrated part that it could only sell in half of the world, necessitating a third party chip for NA with an entirely different architecture.

Your explanation, from that perspective, highlights again that Exynos 5 is simply a poor business choice.

It's not nearly as hard to invent new stuff as it is to choose which new stuff you should be working on and pursuing as a strategy.

Yes.
Sim free iPhone 5s in UK Apple Store £549.00
Sim free Samsung Galaxy S4 in Argos £599.95 although it does have £50 off at the moment making it only 95 pence more expensive than the 5s.

Nice try, sunshine.

For those not familiar with the UK market - Argos is a rather expensive outlet, so by picking them, Crosslad has tried to mislead. Amazon.co.uk has the SG4 16Gb model at £428 SIM free. An HTC One 32 Gb can be had for £375. The iPhone 5s is very expensive.

Galbi, you're funny, as in funny-strange. Apple knows it's making a faster mobile processor and a faster microprocessor in general, that's what. To start with, the A7 has twice as many general purpose registers as the A6 or even Intel's X64 processor architecture. (Oh, wouldn't Intel and AMD like to have 16 more registers to work with? )

What makes these forums colorful are all the folks who post an uninformed opinion before they know much about the topic. Almost too easy to pick them off. What's amusing is that people who do understand the meaning of 64-bit, like Anand Shimpi from Anandtech, are ignored by these uninformed people. Galbi must think he's smarter than Anand. And that's funny.

Is exynos really that bad? I know people were disappointed that it wasn't a true octa-core processor (basically 2 quad-core processors glued together), but it sounds good in theory. Lower power consumption when the slower processor "is good enough" and switches to the faster processor when the user would value speed over battery life.

No. Exynos is not 'that bad' at all and actually kind of rocks. People with the QUALCOMM chips (North American Samsung phones) *wish* they had the Exynos. Its the high end processor. It suffers from basically the same thing Apple is now being 'accused' of. It was released to much fanfare as being an 'eight core processor' but couldn't actually use all 8 at once. It was also expensive to make. It has *huge* potential for the future.... but that's the future =P

It's a little like putting a huge/fast engine in a race car and then not giving it a means to deliver enough gas. It is going to be expensive, but you won't get the optimal performance boost from it.

Apple is being hit with a little bit of the same. They built a 64-bit phone, but there are plenty of other limiting factors that will prevent it from reaching its potential. One of the legit ones is Apple only gave the 5s 1Gig of memory. With a 32-bit bus you can address up to 4GB of memory. So if you have only 1GB of memory there really isn't a driving need for 64-bit since 32-bit really wasn't limiting you.

To use the prior analogy, there really wouldn't be a benefit to a race car to come up with a way to deliver more gas if the engine really didn't have a means to consume it and translate it to power delivered.

I think in both cases the pundits are wrong... If the 5s is delivering twice the performance of the 5 as claimed, that right there is a win either way you slice it- and the fact that is 64bit means it has a ton of potential in future iterations once Apple fixes the 'limiting factors' the pundits are currently focusing on.

Same is true for the Exynos too. If they get all 8 cores firing (and they recently have), then shore up their limiting factors, the thing has a lot of potential for growth.

Focusing on the 'fastest' part of any computer is always a mistake because Amdahl's Law will always come into effect. It happened in PC's when everyone was so focused on building the fastest processors that improving processors started having limited effect- they had to focus on the buses and other limiting factors. The strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link. The speed of a computer (or phone) is determined by its slowest bottleneck.

Either way its good news for consumers. The 5s being twice as fast as the 5 is something any Apple fan should be happy with, and any pundit that misses that is missing the forest for focusing on a tree.

You gain a performance benefit, even if the memory barrier is not an issue.

The A7 has more general purpose registers (31 instead of 14), and these are all 64-bits wide. More registers means less use of the stack or RAM to hold temporary variables such as pointers, counters, etc. If you have a large block of data to process, a 64-bit program can do it in 64-bit chunks at a time, instead of looping through twice as often, processing it 32-bits at a time. There are a few other novelties in the 64-bit ARM design, like PC-relative addressing, guaranteed 128-bit SIMD operations, etc., none of which are about memory barriers.

For most people, the A7 will mean "faster."

One reason I believe Apple chose to jump to Arm 64-Bit is the extra functionality, including AES cryptography and SHA-1/256 hashing on the chip as well as double precision floating point. Both these can lighten the load the processor does currently via software, as well as speeding up the device

From reading other websites it may also enable Apple to sandbox a lot better which would help in the fight against Viruses/Malware and rogue processes. It could even let Apple implement "users" on the iPhone/iPad, which is something we all would like.

... Also the diagram above for the ARM Cortex-A50 series, indicates that the designs are for 20nm and 14nm processes, so maybe the A7 does actually already use a 20nm process rather than the 28nm or 32nm processes previously suspected...now that would really be a jump on the industry. For once Apple's 'doubling down' on security paid off!

Exactly. Now that Apple has a 64-bit SoC, it's possible that all they need to do for the next two or three years is to shrink the die. That means next year's "iPhone 6" might have a 14nm A8, which would be functionally identical to the A7 but faster. Smaller die -> shorter leads -> higher potential clock speeds and/or lower power consumption. A few years down the road, once the process is small enough, Apple could add more cores. If that amount of computing power is actually necessary in an iPhone. (The real trick, of course, would be replacing Intel's power-hungry hot-running x86 legacy chips in the MacBook Air line. The lack of 64-bit processing was the last technical detail preventing that. Apple may soon be able to avoid the Intel Tax.)

Apple's "tick tock" iPhone development cycle only applies to the enclosure. The 3G/3GS, 4/4S, and now 5/5S had similar if not identical enclosures. So from a consumer standpoint, the even-year iPhones appear to be similar to the previous year's iPhones. But the iPhone internal hardware and iOS advance steadily every year. A fact that some bloggers furiously spin as boring and inconsequential. Not any more. With the 64-bit A7, Apple's engineering has broken clear of the pack. Samsung and all would-be competitors are going to fall further behind every year. Especially with Android, the messy mash-up of a boat anchor holding them back.

So yeah, let's all make some popcorn and see how the haters try to spin 64-bit computing in the iPhone 5S. Some will claim it's a "hoax." Others will claim that there is no technical advantage to the ability to address more than a terabyte of RAM. But there's only a small window of opportunity for them to attempt that kind of negative spin. Once the benchmarks are posted, it will be radio silence with respect to 64-bit computing power. Their only talking point will be screen size, which isn't an issue in developed countries.

Exynos is not 'that bad' at all and actually kind of rocks. People with the QUALCOMM chips (North American Samsung phones) *wish* they had the Exynos.

Why would we wish a pox on all our houses? North America didn't get the Exynos because we have broad access to LTE on this continent and LTE consumes significantly more power. Combine more cores with LTE in a Samsung phone and you get even worse battery life. No, thank you!

That is like blowing a 10 gallon air compressor through a straw!
Apple what the heck do you think you are doing?

That is nothing more than marketing ploy to get people reinterested in the smartphone as we are already seeing saturation in the market place.

Sure it's makes a good marketing bullet point, but I wouldn't call it a ploy as I see a real benefit to iPhone going 64-bit that no one around the web seems to be mentioning. While some people gargle on DED's balls as he trys to defend a technology that offers little benefit in its current implementation, I think Apple is busy setting up a base for future products (I believe jungmark hinted at this). Having both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of an OS adds a level of fragmentation and introduces the need for backwards compatibility. Once iOS reaches a point where the benefits of having a 64-bit OS can shine, I'm betting that they won't have to be concerned about offering 32-bit compatibility at that point as the legacy devices will then be 64-bit as well. If this is what Apple is planning then I think it's a really smart move on their part.

And let's not forget the A7X variants for the next iPads and next AppleTV. In one move, Apple can:

differentiate itself from the competition in tablets

become a major player in the console game market with AppleTV

become the leader in a 4K capable AppleTV

create a new market in "personal TV" -- The AppleTV concurrently streams the same (or different) live or recorded videos to multiple iPads *

* Imagine the possibilities: in the home; in the meeting room; in the board room; in the classroom; in the operating room; on set (movie and broadcast/cable TV)

What's holding Apple back from opening up the Apple TV to the AppStore? Instantly have a library of hundreds of thousands of games, game controller compatibility, console-level graphics with the new A7 processors ... As well as other types of media, consumption, and even productivity apps ...

I am willing to bet my right arm that Apple isn't developing an iwatch, but will partner with other companies (such as Nike) to make wearable tech. I think iwatch trademarking is a red herring, and while some trip over themselves (Samsung) to make smartwatches, Apple will take over the living room, the car, and who knows what else.

No. Exynos is not 'that bad' at all and actually kind of rocks. People with the QUALCOMM chips (North American Samsung phones) *wish* they had the Exynos. Its the high end processor. It suffers from basically the same thing Apple is now being 'accused' of. It was released to much fanfare as being an 'eight core processor' but couldn't actually use all 8 at once. It was also expensive to make. It has *huge* potential for the future.... but that's the future =P

If you're only thinking about the specs and benchmarks of the Exynos 5, then yes, it's not "that bad" at all. But in the real world, you can't ignore realities (including cost!) when engineering precision devices selling in massive quantities.

Recall that outside of Apple, nobody really saw any immediate potential in AuthenTech either, because (in the SEC filings of the company) its parts and the work required to integrate them were deemed too expensive. Only Apple saw a way to make Touch ID work AND be affordable and profitable. That's engineering, not just churning out a bigger/faster/higher spec'ed device. That's PC-era doodling.

Exynos 5 clearly cost Samsung lots to develop, just as Apple spent lots of resources on its A6. But Apple put its A6 in every iPhone 5 it sold, and then sold more iPhone 5 units that any other smartphone. That's how to drive down costs. And this year, its using the A6 in the 5c, having driven down costs enough to sell its popular phone (which continued to outsell Samsung's flagship) for $100 less.

The A7 is an ambitious, expensive part. But Apple knows it won't have too much difficulty selling huge volumes this year, and in iPads, and in next years mainstream phone. This is the exciting part of technological progress. And Apple is leading it.

Apple did the same thing with lots of other technologies, leveraging economies of scale to take expensive new technologies and make them affordable, while still making a profit. This is not easy to do.

That's why most companies, including all those White Box tablet makers and PC cloners, only ever assembled parts off the shelf and slopped out yesterday's technology at commensurate prices.

Samsung's costs in developing the (several versions of) Exynos 5 are not benefitting from total global shipments of the GS4 and other flagship models than can command a premium (relative to Samsung's other basic phones running Android 2.x). It's missing vast economies of scale, sending its profits to Qualcomm instead.

Essentially, the difficult position where Apple found itself, buying components from (and enriching) its main rival, is now being inherited by Samsung, which has to pay Qualcomm for finished chips that are designed by Qualcomm (and apparently built by Samsung, at very little profit if you look at the commercial performance of System LSI). That's not how you drive your costs down. That's how you drive your competitor's costs down, as LG and Microkia everyone else now benefits from your economies of scale (but only slightly).

Looking at things from that perspective, the design of Exynos 5 Octa was a huge, grievous error. It would be like Steve Jobs waiting for IBM to deliver the PPC G6 and then being forced to put Intel Core chips in its low end Macs, failing to gain any leverage on either chip platform.

What's holding Apple back from opening up the Apple TV to the AppStore? Instantly have a library of hundreds of thousands of games, game controller compatibility, console-level graphics with the new A7 processors ... As well as other types of media, consumption, and even productivity apps ...

Apple doesn't want to open a failure. There are already SmartTVs and their app stores that aren't really offering anything interesting or useful. It would be a huge resource-sapping distraction for Apple to launch a TV store that nobody cared about, rather than focusing those resources on things that matter.

Congrats to Daniel on a thoughtful article that blends insights from both a business and an engineering perspective.

Having designed integrated circuits I can attest to the complexity in developing a new design. If you add the complexities of moving to a new vendor, modifying your entire OS to take advantage of a 64-bit architecture, modifying the apps that run on that OS, and offloading all of the sensor management to a new M7 processor, it becomes clear that the architectural strategy behind iOS 7 and the A7 chip was far more complicated than it initially appeared.

Daniel also correctly stated the supply chain issues surrounding this level and speed of innovation. The ability of other mobile device manufacturers to replicate Apple's accomplishment will be hindered and delayed for years due to their dependency on OTS parts that don't exist.

I think everyone in the technology media and the mobile industry was simply distracted by the modifications to the look and feel of iOS7, and prior to the Sept. 10 announcement of the iPhone 5s failed to appreciate that Apple has taken a huge leap ahead of the rest of the mobile industry and that there devices will be in a class of their own for the next several years.

"Anyone who thinks they know any of this better than Apple is either wrong or wasting their lives if they are not already generating billions of dollars in value with their grand expertise. Anyone who thinks they know any of this better than Apple is either wrong or wasting their lives if they are not already generating billions of dollars in value with their grand expertise."

This bears repeating. Over and over.

Basically the ultimate rebuke to every single troll nonsense comment made here since the 10th.

It's bad enough that sections of the Android community stereotype us as sheep, without you handing them a smoking gun.

This line "Outside of backwards land, the Exynos 5 Octa was such an expensive failure that Samsung couldn't handle eating its own dog food within the most competitive market of Apple's home continent." is repeated twice, and paragraph #10 ends with this sentence repeating itself. "Anyone who thinks they know any of this better than Apple is either wrong or wasting their lives if they are not already generating billions of dollars in value with their grand expertise."

Seems to me that if you are going to take the time to write a lengthy information article, you should take a few more minutes to let someone proofread it.